Jeremy Dys [00:00:00]:

If we're gonna say Christians get freedom, but Jews do not, or let's flip it around, Muslims get freedom, but Christians do not, well, then we're not committed to freedom. I mean, we're we're committed to a brand of freedom, a singular brand of freedom, but we're not going to allow freedom writ large to occur. Freedom is a risky, dangerous business. It's a dirty business too. It's a maelstrom in some respects. You have a lot of people with a lot of different beliefs coming together, and it's uncomfortable. And sometimes it's even unkind. It's sort of you gotta roll your sleeves up and get in on the nitty gritty of these things, but that's what contributes to human flourishing.

Jeremy Dys [00:00:36]:

That's why we wanna get after that, allow freedom to be maximized on all these things.

Jim Spiegel [00:00:42]:

Welcome to the Kalos Center podcast. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Kalos Center podcast. Our guest today is Jeremy Dice. Jeremy Dice is senior counsel at the First Liberty Institute. First Liberty is the largest legal organization in the country dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans. First Liberty has argued many high profile cases, including some up to the United States Supreme Court and we'll talk about some of those. Jeremy earned his bachelor's degree at Taylor University and his law degree at West Virginia University College of Law.

Jim Spiegel [00:01:29]:

He's a frequent guest on local, state, and national television and radio outlets, and his commentaries have been featured in many state and national publications, including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, The Washington Examiner, and The Federalists. Jeremy and his wife, Jenny, are the proud parents of four strapping boys. So Jeremy Dice, welcome to the Kalos Center podcast. It's good to

Jeremy Dys [00:01:53]:

be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Jim Spiegel [00:01:55]:

So I just want to jump right in here and have you introduce us to First Liberty. Maybe talk about some of the more significant cases that you've worked on over the years.

Jeremy Dys [00:02:06]:

Yeah First Liberty Institute is a nationwide religious liberty law firm. All we do is defend religious liberty for all Americans and we mean that when we say all Americans because we believe that religious liberty for one faith group is religious liberty for everybody and really at the same time that is freedom for all concerned. I mean that that rises the level of freedom in our entire country. We concentrate our efforts on areas of religious freedom in our religious institutions, so our houses of worship, our a parachurch ministries, that sort of thing. Education, we want to make sure our students are free when they go to school to express their religious beliefs in those assignments and throughout the hallways. We practice religious liberty within the military. You give up a lot of stuff to go into the military. You should not give up your religious freedom as one of those things.

Jeremy Dys [00:02:49]:

And we make sure we protect religious freedom in the public arena and in the marketplace. So if you're going anywhere in the country, if you're going any part of your life, you're probably touching an area that we focus on when it comes to religious liberty. In the eleven years that I've been here, I've had the privilege to be really in the front seat of some of the most incredible lawsuits and, culture shaping the conversations we've had in the last well, certainly the last decade, but certainly a better part of my life. Those include cases we've been I guess we've had, I think, five cases or or a little bit more than that actually now in five years of the Supreme Court of the United States. All wins. And so you've got things ranging from coach Kennedy who took a knee in silent prayer after a football game and was fired. He had a massive effect on religious liberty law. Graw versus DeJoy, which involves accommodating religious beliefs in the workplace.

Jeremy Dys [00:03:37]:

We've got, Carson versus Macon, which involves the right of parents to be able to access tuition dollars to provide religious education for their children. American Legion versus American Humanist Association, which has involved a religious monument on public square, changing of a law when it comes to the establishment clause. And there's there's more on top of all that. And those are just the Supreme Court cases. I've had the privilege of doing everything from sending a demand letter and resolving a matter on behalf of a synagogue, whether that's in Beverly Hills, literally it was one in Beverly Hills, or Hawaii where we're still working on a case out there on the Big Island for a synagogue there, to filing lawsuits on behalf of churches like we have in Bryan, Ohio where the pastor is trying to keep his church open twenty four hours a day and receiving some pushback. I'm sure we're gonna talk about that later on as well. And then going on with those cases on up the ladder to district court, to courts of appeal, and then to the Supreme Court of the United States, all with the purpose of defending religious liberty for all Americans. If the listeners are interested, of course, I'd encourage them to go to our website because there's a lot of cases that I'm not even beginning to scratch the surface of at firstliberty.org, f I r s t liberty.

Jim Spiegel [00:04:42]:

Thank you. I would echo that. The website's great. Introducing people to various cases that you're working on now or that you've dealt with in the past, what are some of

Jeremy Dys [00:04:52]:

the cases you're working on right now? Well, I mentioned that one about the pastor in Ohio. This is in a little town called Bryan, Ohio, which is up in that Northwest corner South of Detroit, sort of Southwest from Detroit between that and Fort Wayne, if you kind of triangulate, West of Toledo. Bryan, Ohio is a little town. That's where the Etch A Sketch had been manufactured for years. The Dum Dum lollipops are still made there. And Dad's Place Church is operating just off the historic town square. So it's a really really little beautiful little town downtown area. And, this pastor had in mind the ability to create a church that would minister to those who have been sort of pushed to the edges of society.

Jeremy Dys [00:05:31]:

And so he's located right next to job and family services, right next to a low income health center. It's right around the corner from the hospital and some other things that are that are sort of catering to those needs. And he just decided with the church it became evident that there was a need to create a space where people could go to be safe. And so they opened up their church twenty four hours a day and decided they're never gonna lock their doors. If you needed a place to go, you'd come to dad's place. If you want to just come in the middle of night and play cards, you can come to dad's place. If you want if you need a place to stay out of the cold, you can come to dad's place and sit there. 11:00 every night, the lights go dim.

Jeremy Dys [00:06:05]:

Johnny Cash comes on the speaker, and he starts reading from Genesis one. And right around 7AM, he gets done with Revelation. And so the Bible's playing all night long. Long. They call this the rest and refresh in the Lord ministry, which I think is just a very creative title. But the city doesn't view it quite as, optimistically as I do. They last November, the twenty twenty three November, they, noticed some things going on there and they decided to send in their zoning, czar, if you will, the guy there, and say you're you're in violation of the zoning law. Accompanying with him was the fire chief and he found a few deficiencies with the fire code.

Jeremy Dys [00:06:42]:

Of course, they fixed those. And what resulted from that has been, a complete mess. There were, I think, in a span of about three and a half months, there were at least 10 fire inspections during that time, some of which took place at 05:30 in the morning. The fire chief cited them and then, we got those removed and he cited them again. There were 18 criminal counts of, fire code violations that they've trumped up against the pastor of that church. We had those dismissed as a part of a mutual agreement, then he had reinstituted some more criminal charges against the pastor. Finally after about five months of this, for the first time in about five months, the fire chief says, Well you've changed use of the property. You need to install a fire suppression system.

Jeremy Dys [00:07:21]:

And so that's not a cheap endeavor and certainly not one that happens overnight. He gave him seven days to put that new fire suppression system in there at a cost of at least a hundred thousand dollars to make that happen. We couldn't make that happen obviously and the and the city continued to go after him. I'll try to make this shorter. The the the zoom to the end is that they ended up filing after we had already filed a federal lawsuit against them, they filed a lawsuit to enforce the fire code in state civil court. And then also these criminal charges were pending. So this last December, Pastor Avelle, sat in the criminal trial where thieves and robbers had sat before him, was pronounced guilty of having violated the fire code. And the civil court also said we can enforce this fire code against you.

Jeremy Dys [00:08:03]:

You're just trying to use this religious liberty thing as a way to get escape enforcement, which is just simply balderdash, of course. And so now we're on appeal at the Ohio sixth District Court of Appeals in Toledo, and we're trying to vindicate his rights to make sure that he's got the ability to exercise his religious beliefs. And I should mention this one thing that's very important. While the city's been forceful against this church for allowing people to fall asleep overnight inside of this church, you would expect that they would be consistent with that across the board, that they wouldn't allow people to sleep inside of a building on the First Floor without a fire suppression system. That's what they've said after all is the problem. But if you look around town, what you're gonna find is it's motels. There are three motels in Bryan. None of them have a fire suppression system.

Jeremy Dys [00:08:48]:

They're grandfathered. And the fire chief says that's an economic consideration that they made. The apartment complexes in Bryan, Ohio that are one story. They don't have a fire suppression system. And also the senior living facilities in Bryan, Ohio, some of them do not have a fire suppression system. So it appears to me that the city is being quite unfair, if nothing else. And it reminds me a lot of what happened in COVID, where the city is saying, well, look, you can't you can't, worship in large numbers in a church building because that's a super spreader event. But if you wanna go to the casino or the liquor store or Walmart and gather in large numbers, we got no problem at all.

Jeremy Dys [00:09:21]:

Just stay six feet away from each other. It's the same sort of analysis. You can't have a crisis in one place and not the other, and the Supreme Court has rightly called that into question. So that's one case. We got a case like it in Arizona where there's a pastor trying to hand out food at his church and the city's been upset about that. We have a synagogue up in New York. I was just on a conference call about this morning where they're trying to move into one town and the city had tried to take that property through eminent domain, which is that's a new one for me, where they're not just simply trying to zone you out, they're just simply trying to take your property now, which creates its own problems and troubles. And we're also working on behalf of parents in California at the Ninth Circuit right now who are trying to homeschool their kids using some of the funds from the state that they give to everybody else to educate their kids.

Jeremy Dys [00:10:00]:

But you can't use that to have any kind of religious curriculum as a part of that process, and we see that as a real problem. And I could keep on going with other situations that we have throughout the throughout the country, but that's just a smattering of the things we're working on right now.

Jim Spiegel [00:10:14]:

Wow, yeah, well we call that Bryant case the treatment unfair, to put it lightly, that's it's brutal harassment. All of the cases that you deal with pertain to the first amendment of the US Constitution, specifically the part that says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. So there are two key aspects to this part of the amendment. What's called the establishments clause and the free exercise clause. Can you talk about each

Jeremy Dys [00:10:47]:

of those? Yeah. Let's back up and get a running start into that because to understand the first amendment, you have to understand the seven articles that come before it. It. And and the seven articles of the constitution, it starts with that great preamble. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, do and says a few other things, do hereby ordain and establish this constitution. And it goes through and throughout those seven articles says, here's what we're assembling a a government to do that we can't do on our own. And so for instance, you can't lay in a navy. Your backyard pool just doesn't support it and probably wouldn't be a wise idea if you had a kind of a vigilante force of a navy.

Jeremy Dys [00:11:20]:

We're decided that we're going to form a central government to do that. Same thing with taxes. If you take money from your neighbor, that's theft. But the IRS, they just call that, taxes, and and that's okay. We can have a conversation about that probably on another program. But we've agreed at a certain level to have a compact, a social compact to form a more perfect union, and that's fine. So we give the government powers legislatively, judicially, executive. The presidency has some powers.

Jeremy Dys [00:11:43]:

And then there's the smattering of other ones that are that are out there. And then you have this blank space between article seven and the first amendment. And what starts after the signatures in the first of the Bill of Rights is very important. And it says Congress shall make no law. Well, that that's fascinating to me because the first part of that constitution has been Congress shall make all these laws. Right? We're giving you the rights. We have these rights as our own individual creation, but we're giving some of them to you to do in the collective what we can't do in as the individual. But now there's this bright line in the constitution that starts with with the first amendment that says congress will make no law.

Jeremy Dys [00:12:17]:

And so then you have the the various freedoms that are preserved within the First Amendment ranging from religion to speech to press and all the rest, assembly. And those two religion clauses are critical, and they're listed among the first. And specifically, the establishment clause is meant to say, we're not going to dictate to you in other words, we did not give to you as a people government. We did not give you the right to tell us what we should believe and how we should exercise our faith. And so you've got, as justice Gorsuch is later gonna say, two sides of one coin in those two clauses. On the one side of the coin, you have the esaption clause, which says to government, you can't tell us to where we have to go to worship. We we're not all Anglicans today because of the esaption clause. We are Baptists and Presbyterians and Catholics and Muslims and Jews and all the rest.

Jeremy Dys [00:13:01]:

So you can choose where your faith tells you to have to worship. And not only will the government tell you where you cannot worship, the free exercise clause comes along and says, we're gonna respect your right to exercise your faith. Because what one person may may see as just some sort of harebrained idea is actually a responsibility that that person has to the divine. This is something that John Adams is gonna take up in his memorial remonstrance in saying that what looks like as something just responsibility on the horizontal level is actually something that is sacred to the divine. We have a moral responsibility to the divine. And the goal of the first amendment then, the goal of religious liberty, is to maximize the space where someone who has an obligation above and beyond that of his obligation to one another and to the state, to some eternal being. And if that is actually true, then we as a government, we as a people, have to respect the right of people to exercise their faith, even when that means we concede a few things perhaps that we wouldn't give otherwise. The practical outworkings of that are enormous, and I'm sure we'll talk more about those.

Jeremy Dys [00:14:06]:

But to give you one sort of an example, this is why we have various laws protecting the use of religious land, meaning churches and synagogues, that they can use property. They actually have a privileged status over top of like Dunkin Donuts or the movie theater or something like that. Why? Because we respect the right of religious entities, organizations, people that get together in groups to practice their religion. We're gonna privilege that right to practice their religion over and against the ordinary business, which is both fascinating but also unique in the history of mankind. That is not something that we see as you look down the annals of history. Rather you see here in The United States a real robust commitment to protecting the religious liberty of all of its citizens and the organizations they foster.

Jim Spiegel [00:14:51]:

That's good stuff Jeremy, you should do this for a living man. Such a lucid and clear headed common sense analysis that in spite of that are some pretty pervasive misunderstandings regarding what each of those clauses means. Can you speak to some of those?

Jeremy Dys [00:15:10]:

Well, we we should go back to, Chief Justice Earl Warren and have a conversation. That's probably where the the things have gone off the rails during the Warren Court years of the fifties and sixties where there's a smattering of case law that came through, and resulted in some really bad press. I mean people know about Roe v Wade. That was at the tail end of the Warren Court era. But there are other cases: Lemon versus Kurtzman and Abington School District versus Schempp and Engel versus Vitale. All these cases come out during that that time that there's a real pushback to the free exercise of religion that, then started calling into into question. So, you know, I mentioned a case earlier called American Legion versus the American Humanist Association. That was a case we brought to the Supreme Court eventually that involved a veterans memorial.

Jeremy Dys [00:15:50]:

That Veterans Memorial was installed in 1925 by mothers who had sent their kids off to war, and they didn't come back. And and one mother who worked on this project, it was gonna be a 30 foot, Celtic cross, which was sort of emblematic of the day of World War I. One mother said that she would never visit her son's graveside because her son was buried over in Europe somewhere. And he didn't just hop a plane and go see the gravestone. She said, this, in a very real way, is my son's gravestone. And so there was that monument erected after World War I to honor 49 men from Bladensburg, from Prince William County in in Maryland, in Bladensburg, Maryland. And it sat there until the highway had to be kind of expanded. And as the highways expanded, it'd be fascinating for you to go there by the way, because it's like it is the worst designed intersection in America.

Jeremy Dys [00:16:38]:

The National Highway ends right there, and so it goes from DC to Annapolis. And there's another highway that peels off of it this way.

Jim Spiegel [00:16:44]:

Now it

Jeremy Dys [00:16:45]:

is like playing Frogger to get to this monument because you got to get over about four lanes of traffic in a quasi traffic circle but not really. It's just, frightening. But that monument has stood there because the citizens said we're never going to tear that down. This was the American Legion that had donated the property. It was their monument. They're going to keep that thing there despite the expansion and the needs of improved traffic. Well, that stood there for almost ninety years until someone decided that they were finally offended at the presence of that cross on a public right of way. And so they did what most Americans do, they filed a lawsuit.

Jeremy Dys [00:17:17]:

Right? This is what we do apparently when we disagree with something. We don't just simply say, well, that's something I disagree with, I'm moving on. No. He had to file a federal lawsuit about this whole thing, and we intervened on behalf of the American Legion and righted the whole thing. Well, I tell that whole predicate to say this, that there's a there have been decades now of of constitutional law that had developed that if you were offended at the sight of something religious in the public square, whether that was a monument on public property or take a prayer over the loudspeaker prior to the kickoff of a football game on a Friday night or or anything else. There had been this body of case law that had developed that said, well, if if, if the reasonable observer, who also happens to be an omniscient observer apparently, familiar with all the facts and circumstances surrounding this situation, if that reasonable observer is going to be offended, then the monument has to come down. And so religion, which was supposed to be given preferred status, actually had it flipped around. And so if the reasonable observer ever showed up, the reasonable observer only came to knock down the monument or the religious action in public.

Jeremy Dys [00:18:18]:

And that had been the case for my entire lifetime up until 2019. Most of your lifetime and most of the people that are listening, most of their lifetimes. If religion was in public and someone challenged it, then the action in public, the monument, they had to defend themselves and prove that they were somehow consistent with the history of our country. Well, the Supreme Court in the stroke of a pen switched that around as they should have. And they turned that around and said, no, no, no. We have a history and tradition as a country of honoring religion and its place in society. If you don't like it, you're welcome to not like it, but you now have to prove that it is somehow outside the history and tradition of our country. And this they've been unable to do, and this is the new standard here.

Jeremy Dys [00:18:57]:

So that's just one example of case law that has developed over time, and it becomes so rigid, in fact, that that lower courts just simply applied it. They disagreed with the Supreme Court who tried repeatedly to kill off that case law. In fact, Justice Scalia one time referred to it as a ghoul that keeps on showing up in the first act to be slaughtered in the second only to arise again from the dead in the third. And so you could never get rid of this this case law called lemon that we ultimately did get rid of in in Kennedy versus Bremerton. But it had been so ingrained in the legal community, it was hard to get rid of by judges and lawyers. Now imagine what it would be like for the average person who hearing this all the time for forty and fifty years now, has been sort of coddled into thinking that religion in public is a bad thing, when the founding fathers meant it to be something quite the opposite of that. And so that's a that's more of a history lesson perhaps than you asked for in your question, but that's what's happened in the years. And this is one isolated issue under the establishment clause.

Jeremy Dys [00:19:50]:

We can keep on going on on other areas of religious liberty where there's been this sort of drumbeat by especially those on the progressive left that have said religion bad, therefore it has to be going. And what they present in the alternative is a quote neutrality, which is enforced secularism more often than not. Which we would like to point out is actually not neutral. I would love to get back to neutral in many cases. But I think the first amendment actually goes beyond just neutrality and provides preferred status for religious liberty.

Jim Spiegel [00:20:19]:

Well as you know well, when it comes to constitutional laws, Supreme Court decisions, precedent is everything. You've got you've just named some cases that have just made it harder for people today to defend their religious liberty. What particular Supreme Court cases have made your job easier that have have provided some help with regard to preserving a proper understanding of that amendment?

Jeremy Dys [00:20:45]:

Yeah. Well the ones that we've come up with recently are are sort of the best examples, and they're the ones that we can speak of positively because it's taken literally decades for us to get to this point. I mean we can go back to Article One and talk about the or the First Amendment and talk about how important that is as a baseline for that, of course. But there are these recent cases of Kennedy versus Bremerton that that killed the establishment clause problem with Lemon versus Kurtzman. That that just removed that issue. And think of this beforehand that if you were a teacher before under the Lemon law, you would have to check your religious beliefs at the schoolhouse gates. Even though there's a case back in the nineteen sixties called Tinker v. Des Moines, which stood for the opposite principle there.

Jeremy Dys [00:21:22]:

That we don't require you to check your your freedoms, your first amendment freedoms at the schoolhouse gate. But the schools have been applying this in such a way that if you were a Jewish teacher for instance, you could have no visible display of your religious beliefs. So that's a real problem for certain religious beliefs. So you'd have to leave your yarmulke in the, in the glove box. Or what if you're a Catholic teacher and wore a crucifix? Well, you'd have to take that crucifix off, put it in your purse. If you wore a headdress within the Muslim tradition, you got to take that off. Think of certain religious traditions like Sikhs and others that to remove those head head coverings is to damn their souls. But this would be the tradition that's been developed underneath the case law.

Jeremy Dys [00:22:00]:

And we can see now how how how detrimental this is, not just simply at the horizontal human experience, but at the experience of eternity. And so you're not just simply denying them a special privilege because they are of a minority faith, you're actually causing them to sin against their teachings and jeopardize their eternal souls. And so Lemon versus Kurtzman was a terrible case law that we were able to overturn in Kennedy versus Bremerton. So now we have a great thing where justice Gorsuch writing that opinion as I alluded to earlier says, hey guys, you keep on using this establishment clause as sort of this cudgel against religious liberty. Don't you realize that it's on the other side of the coin from the free exercise clause? In other words, these are supposed to be meant to complement one another. They're supposed to maximize religious freedom. And you've been using the establishment clause to war against the free exercise clause, but that's not the way this is supposed to be interpreted. And then you have other cases like Fulton versus the city of Philadelphia that talks about, you know, how you can't, you know, create exceptions in your case law or in your ordinances for a variety of things, but then put the grease against any religious exercise there.

Jeremy Dys [00:23:04]:

If you've got a system of exceptions that have been created here, you can't say, well, we're gonna give that fine to everybody else, but not to the religious people. That that's a problem. And then there's more with American Legion, like I talked about, Groff versus Joy, which overturned a case from nineteen seventy eight or nine. I called TDVA versus Hardison. Now you have to engage people within the workplace with their religious beliefs. You actually have to work to accommodate them. Whereas before, you could just simply say, well, that's gonna be more than a quote de minimis cost as my business to my business to accommodate your religious beliefs. Religion loses.

Jeremy Dys [00:23:34]:

Now everybody from the boardroom to the mailroom has to work together to figure out how they can accommodate religious beliefs within the workforce, which is exactly what we wanna have happen. So the best cases that have developed the area of religious liberty have really come in the last decade to fifteen years now.

Jim Spiegel [00:23:49]:

And you guys have had a lot to do with that. That's this is what's so exciting about the work that you're doing, right? I mean, of course, in the present moment we're concerned about protecting the religious liberties of the people who are being harangued and harassed, you know, for, just practicing their religion in normal ways. We care about that. You care about that. But the long view through history, a more, say, chronologically longitudinal view sees even more significant, far more significant positive ramifications what you're doing because you're you're helping to establish, Supreme Court precedent that decades, even centuries down the road could protect the religious liberties of people, you know, many generations from now. It's that has to be a pretty satisfying thought.

Jeremy Dys [00:24:39]:

It's enormously gratifying. It's been a fun part of my career. This is what I wanted to do for most of my life anyway. So I'm sort of a pagan slob doing what I wanted to I am what I wanted to be when I grew up. Right? This is what I wanted to do since the eighth grade. So here I am, and that's fun. But it's not just yes. The the case law is critical, and it's been wonderful developments we've seen in the case law in the last decade.

Jeremy Dys [00:24:57]:

But there have been along the way these great things that have been ensconced in federal law as well. So you've got things like the Equal Access Act of 1984. So when I was six years old, the congress said no more of this business of saying that the chess club and the AV club and the Frisbee club, that's literally a club in some schools, they can meet in schools, no problem. They can use all the resources, make announcements over the loudspeaker, all these things. But the religious clubs, no, you can't have those happen here. And so congress passes the law that says no, we're not gonna allow that to be the case anymore. Well, that developed out of litigation. And then in the nineties, 1995, I think it was, when the the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, that was put into place in a reaction to a bad case from Justice Scalia, which we can talk about perhaps in a moment as well.

Jeremy Dys [00:25:40]:

ARRIFR has been a huge defensive piece of legislation that I use almost on a daily basis. And something that grew out of that is something called ARLUPA, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which is gonna guarantee not only the rights of people to use their property for religious worship, so churches, synagogues, etcetera, but also we're going to and think about how impressive this is in the course of human history. We're going to make sure that our our prisoners have religious freedom. You've committed a felony, but you still have not forfeited your innate God given right to religious liberty. I find that amazing in the course of human history where religious dissidents have been jailed and beheaded for the religious opposition to the reigning monarch or whomever it might be. But in America we're gonna give them full faith and credit for their religious liberty even in jail.

Jim Spiegel [00:26:28]:

That is one of the things that makes this country truly great and our constitution really a singular document right, in the history of governments and specifically in the social contract tradition. Now you just mentioned, if I hear you right, a criticism of Scalia, Antonin Scalia, which I would assume you agree with him on most things, leads me into my next question, which is a question about a broader kind of philosophy of law or constitutional law. What is your own interpretive approach when it comes to the US Constitution and why?

Jeremy Dys [00:27:03]:

Yeah, I think recently it was, I think it was Justice Kagan. I may be just alluding it or giving her credit where credit's not supposed to be, but let me do it so now. But I think Justice Kagan said we're all originalists now. The originalist movement that was started probably before Justice Scalia, but certainly with Justice Scalia as the famous standard bearer of that, we are all originalists now. In other words, the originalist mindset has triumphed, meaning there was a battle for many years. It started with a Warren court. Well, it probably didn't start there, but it gained popularity with the Warren court and moved on through the ages of interpreting this constitution as not a set in stone, words have meaning type of a constitution, but one that, progressed and changes really over time. It's a living, breathing document that we can read into things in our modern context, words that didn't mean anything in the in the ancient context.

Jeremy Dys [00:27:54]:

And so there developed a real bad set of laws out of that. We've discussed a bunch of those already. Justice Scalia comes along and really holds forth the standard of what's called originalism and saying there is an original meaning that can be discovered with these words that people passing these laws or using these language this language in their opinions that we can actually understand and give meaning to. And he combines that with textualism, which means that we're gonna look at the text first instead of sort of the, as Justice Kennedy liked to talk about, the penumbra of the constitution, or past justices like to talk about the the sort of the outer areas of the constitution that's not black and white, but sort of the sun shines and casts a shadow, and those are the the rights we derive out of that. We see that especially in Roe versus Wade where they talk about the rights of privacy, which are not within the Constitution but they say are derived from the Civil War amendments to the Constitution. And so Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas and others are gonna carry this banner forward to say no no There's language. They have words. They have meaning.

Jeremy Dys [00:28:53]:

We should look at what those words mean, and we should actually start with the text. Let's look at the law. What does it actually say? Rather than looking at the edges of these documents that have at least gray language, if not, no language whatsoever. And so Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas are going to ultimately carry the day, although I would probably argue that what originalism meant under Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas has taken a slightly different change. And I'll give a footnote to Justice Gorsuch on that one, who I've got an area of disagreement with on that point when it comes to originalism. But at least we're using the text and we're using original language to go through that whole thing. So I would ascribe to being an original textualist myself and prefer that sort of as the method of interpretation even as I'm a good litigator and if there's a stick on the bridge and I can use that to defeat my enemy, I might pick it up and beat him with it. But, that's just being a lawyer.

Jeremy Dys [00:29:41]:

Okay.

Jim Spiegel [00:29:42]:

So I would assume everybody on the First Liberty team would hold a similar view when it comes to that basic interpretive approach of the Constitution but surely you would you must disagree on certain issues regarding particular cases, maybe strategic if not substantive. I'm wondering do you have a basic approach on your team at First Liberty for resolving such conflicts?

Jeremy Dys [00:30:08]:

Yeah. You know, look I'm sure there is a lot of similarity. We all have the same motivation to do the work we're doing, so you're gonna attract birds of a feather as it were. But you know when we do have disagreements, and there certainly are, the benefit is that we all believe in the right to be able to disagree with one another. And that's what the founding fathers had as their mindset as well in crafting the first amendment. That they wanted this enlightenment ideal of having the truth come to the top through challenge. And so they wanted to search for capital T truth in that enlightenment era. And I think we find the same thing, and I don't mean to put us in the category of Madison and Jefferson and the rest, but I think we as lawyers have this sort of same mentality that it's good for us to challenge one another and to find out where the truth actually lies within our ideas.

Jeremy Dys [00:30:50]:

And so it's not an environment where we sit back in our ivory tower and, you know, pop the pipe out and start discussing these things in an academic kind of a way, but we do look at these issues and say, how can we maximize religious freedom and what's the best way to do that? And often, and I would say most of the time, what results from that is sort of what we've talked about already. Let's look at the text. What was the original meaning of the constitution? What's the original meaning of this opinion that is out there? What does the original meaning and the text say about this and the statute? And you'd be surprised by how often, thankfully outside of First Liberty, but you'd be surprised how often that is not the case, especially, I hate to single them out, but I will, school board attorneys. For some reason they think that religious liberty sort of stopped developing after about 1984, '19 '80 '5 when Lee versus Weisman came out. There's been a whole body of case law that's come up since then. And so we're fighting for instance right now in Connecticut. A teacher there, a Catholic teacher, has a personal workspace inside the classroom. She has her crucifix on the wall and that's what she would like to have there as a part of her personal effects.

Jeremy Dys [00:31:54]:

And they wanted her to take it down. And not just take it down, they said, well just put it in the drawer, put it in your pocket, put it under your desk, hide it, in other words. There's a song about a bushel and a candle that comes to mind when I think about that, but I will leave that for the elementary folks. The reality is though is that they never said anything about the Patriots poster that's on the wall. There's a baby Yoda on another teacher's desk, and you can go on and on about these personal effects. There's no problem with that. But they have forgotten that Kennedy versus Bremerton has changed the game. No longer can you just simply say, well, the exception clause says that's got to go.

Jeremy Dys [00:32:27]:

No. No. No. No. You've got to balance that against the rights of free exercise as well that you don't shed when you walk through the schoolhouse gates.

Jim Spiegel [00:32:35]:

I love that. It occurs to me, this might have occurred to you, when it comes to the kind of philosophy of interpretation of the Constitution or let's say hermeneutics, right? A hermeneutical interpretive philosophy there. There's a similar debate in biblical studies, right? When it comes to exactly what the scriptures are teaching and there's a there's a popular contemporary theory, kind of a reader response sort of thing that, well, here's what it means to me now or to us in our present moments, a kind of biblical hermeneutic that is parallel to that, you know, the constitution is a living document sort of approach. And it's just as pernicious and historically we've seen kind of comparable damage when it comes to the history of biblical interpretation that we've seen in the history of constitutional law. That that would be an interesting topic for, you know, another hour long conversation right there.

Jeremy Dys [00:33:34]:

I had a philosophy professor in college that used to talk about things like that as well. And it's true. I mean, it's very true that there is, I think what you're seeing there is just a species of, this is going to be not quite accurate, but there's a species of good versus evil that is present in any sphere of our society. What is capital T true works, and what is not capital T true does not work. And so there is this sort of yin yang, cause and effect, back and forth, whatever you want to call it, that goes on wherever truth is trying to rise to the top. And so you'll see that with that approach within the law versus you know the the progressive constitutional folks versus the originalists, as well as the the in theological traditions where there is a progressive element to read into the text things that really just aren't there and a commitment by orthodox reformed traditions as the major points to say no no there's a text that we ought to follow. Those words mean something. Let's search out what the meaning of those terms are and what the the people who wrote them originally intended for them to mean.

Jeremy Dys [00:34:33]:

And so for for myself being a a a Protestant Christian, it's helpful to sort of lean into that tradition from a theological perspective and sort of port it over, at least it's easy for me to do so inside of my legal practice.

Jim Spiegel [00:34:45]:

So this might be obvious to a lot of our listeners, but I think it'd be worth pausing on that point. And I'd like to hear you speak to how you see your work as an attorney doing this kind of first amendment, religious freedom work as an expression of your personal faith.

Jeremy Dys [00:35:01]:

Yeah, there's an old question that people raise to lawyers all the time and usually goes something like this, how can you defend someone you know who's guilty? And thankfully I don't have to do that very often. In fact, my my interaction with criminal law has only been recent with a pastor who's been charged with with crimes. And I'm smart enough to know I don't know everything about criminal law and I get a guy who does to come in our team and help out. But it's the same sort of idea that how do you practice religious freedom and get religious freedom for those with whom you have an eternal theological disagreement with. And I see no inconsistency with that whatsoever. And perhaps I'm way too enlightenment in my thinking on this, not to say that I'm enlightened, but I mean to pull back to Locke and others that are in that enlightenment era, to say I'm happy to have my freedom of religion and to be able to have the freedom to articulate my religious beliefs. And I'm willing to withstand the scrutiny of those religious beliefs against all other comers, whether those are religious, philosophic, or ideological. I'm willing to put what I believe is capital t truth out there and have a debate so that if I'm wrong, it will be proven wrong and be demonstrated wrong.

Jeremy Dys [00:36:09]:

But more than likely, what I'm gonna find is that what I believe in three logical circumstances is gonna be correct. And so I'm more than happy to represent people of other faiths that I would hold from a theological perspective strong eternal disagreements with. But I want them to have the space to be able to speak their message, live their religious beliefs, so that I would also have the freedom to be able to articulate what I think is the better eternal perspective that they have as well. And so when you see, Paul and others talking about contending for the faith, Peter talking about that as well, I think that is all just part and parcel of what we do as attorneys. We have the freedom to contend for the faith wherever that may be. But if we as a country, we as a people group, don't have the freedom to contend for our faith, if we believe that as protestants or whatever you are, then that other people group are not going to be able to have that either. Take it out of that theological for a second though, and just think of it in pure terms of freedom. If we're gonna say Christians get freedom, but Jews do not, or let's flip it around, Muslims get freedom, but Christians do not, well, then we're not committed to freedom.

Jeremy Dys [00:37:13]:

I mean, we're we're committed to a brand of freedom, a singular brand of freedom, but we're not going to allow freedom writ large to occur. Freedom is a risky dangerous business. It's a dirty business too. It's a it's a maelstrom in some respects. You have a lot of people with a lot of different beliefs coming together, and it's uncomfortable. And sometimes it's even unkind. It's sort of you gotta roll your sleeves up and get in on the nitty gritty of these things, but that's what contributes to human flourishing. That's why we wanna get after that, allow freedom to be maximized on all these things.

Jeremy Dys [00:37:46]:

I like to kid my second amendment friends that, you know the only way you get to the second amendment and take away those freedoms is by going through the first amendment first. And so we want to have maximum amounts of freedom in our country, not to restrict those freedoms. And if we have to restrict those freedoms, we had better have a really compelling reason for why we have to restrict those freedoms. I think those all derive from a in a historic tradition, yes. But I think you can trace those back to teachings of Sacred Scripture that that allow for challenge to the ultimate truth.

Jim Spiegel [00:38:18]:

You're also in a pretty straightforward way applying the golden rule to what you do, right? So in our society we have maybe a Christian majority certain certainly vis a vis practicing Jews and Muslims, and you're working to preserve their religious freedom, just as you would want them to defend your Christian religious freedom if you were in a predominantly Jewish or Muslim society. It's a you could look at it like that. It's a simple application of the golden rule.

Jeremy Dys [00:38:48]:

Yeah. I was at a place, you may have been there at some point, it's called Devil's Tower out in Wyoming. Beautiful, beautiful outcropping of granite that just suddenly lifts out of the earth. And it's a very sacred area to Native Americans. And I was there with my family. We were much they were much younger at the time. I guess I was younger too. And we're walking around the base of it all.

Jeremy Dys [00:39:05]:

And there are these little bows that are tied on the trees around the base of of, Devil's Tower. And what that is is those are visible prayers by Native Americans. They will tie a bow on a tree stem or whatever it might be. And my son asked her, I thought, a really good question. Dad, why do we allow these things to be here? They're kind of they're ragged. They've been worn by weather. They're kind of detracting from the otherwise beautiful bucolic area of the of the Wyoming countryside. Why do we allow those to be here? And why do we, he was saying basically as Christians, he says, why do we allow those to stand when we think those are false religions? It was a great teaching moment, which you got to seize on as a dad.

Jeremy Dys [00:39:41]:

Right? And he said, look, it doesn't bother me that those prayers are there. I I don't tend to believe that those are true. I I have a different philosophical and theological belief on that. But it also doesn't harm me. And so I'm happy to allow them to have their religious beliefs so that if I ever win a time to have a conversation with them, I can tell them what I think is actually true. But if we just simply cancel that religious belief over there, then there's not that's going to be that's going to inflict a wound upon freedom itself, and we can't allow for that to be the case.

Jim Spiegel [00:40:14]:

Very good. So you mentioned earlier that you're doing really what you wanted to do since you were very young. I'm curious just about the chronology here. Did your vision for your life career wise, did that precede or follow your Christian conversion? Or did it kind of grow with it?

Jeremy Dys [00:40:33]:

I I would say probably I've never had to answer the question that way. I would guess that the best way to answer that is that it grew together. You know, I had the great privilege of growing up in a Christian home. Parents loved me and took me to church every single Sunday, twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday. It was that kind of a home growing up. And they taught us at the dinner table about our faith. We would talk about cultural issues of the day and apply our worldview to them. We had devotions after church, after our meals and all that.

Jeremy Dys [00:40:55]:

So I just credit my parents greatly for discipling me well. And it really is just a natural outcropping from that where I said, Well this is what I believe, now what do I do with that? And then I started to get exposed to some things that were related to our history as a country. And some of the things that are that used to be taught in our textbooks, the traditions that our country had reflected that have been taken out of a lot of our textbooks, I got to read a bunch of those things. I've gotten to know some friends that that that did those texts at the time, but now my friends today. And it's exciting to know that whether or not our founding fathers were all Christian, and I I don't know that I would agree that they were, but they certainly had a respect for the the Christian tradition. And for many of the same reasons that we've already talked about for why they wanted freedom to flourish here. So that set me sort of on a path there. So my parents pushed training me in my world view.

Jeremy Dys [00:41:43]:

That's why I ended up at a school like Taylor University where there was an integration of faith and learning. That's literally the the kind of the catchphrase from Taylor, epitomized by the the bell tower there on campus that combines those two lights together. And so I developed that throughout throughout undergrad and and and had some great professors like you and others that were to speak into that in my lifetime. But also, and I jokingly say this, but I think it's a little bit true, I think I argued too much with my parents and they sort of identified someone who would have a skill in argumentation and debate for good or ill, I suppose. And certainly there was a lot of ill there that I needed to correct and mature from. But then put me on a path towards being an attorney to defend religious freedom. I knew that in the eighth grade. I didn't fully understand what that meant, I guess, probably back then, but that never got away from me.

Jeremy Dys [00:42:26]:

And so as I understood that sort of calling, because it had such a reliance upon my worldview and my beliefs, it just naturally grew together. And so it ultimately ended up with me being here eleven years ago.

Jim Spiegel [00:42:40]:

Well, kudos to your parents. They did some great work there and not just putting up with your, snotty nosed, annoying arguments, but continuing to push you in the right direction and, but that it culminated in this. That's that's really cool. So your clients are not the only ones for whom the First Amendment is precious, right? It's it's crucial for all Americans. It's easy to take for granted. I think we all do. And it's probably safe to say that every day somewhere in this country, our religious freedom is under attack. Is there something that the average American can do to contribute to this cause of defending religious freedom and our first amendment rights more generally?

Jeremy Dys [00:43:22]:

I love this question for a lot of reasons. Look, I think people want me to answer that question by saying, well then, you know, go create a petition, go to Washington, go to be Mr. Smith, go to Washington and run for office, become a judge, go to law school. And all those things may be appropriate callings. Perhaps at some point, you'll actually be one of my clients. You know, you may have a need for me then. If that's the case, great. And I want you to know, and I'm not just speaking to you, Jim, but to others that are listening, if that comes to your doorstep, number one, understand that there are groups like ours at First Liberty that will defend your religious freedom.

Jeremy Dys [00:43:54]:

I didn't say this at the beginning, but it bears mentioning here. We do that for free. We never charge our clients. All of our work is done pro bono. And we do that because we think that if you've lost your religious freedom, you should not have to pay an attorney to get those back. And and that's backed up by some federal law. So we we're happy to defend you for for free. And there's a lot of people that are staying behind us to fund our efforts for that very purpose.

Jeremy Dys [00:44:14]:

So if that does come to you, you are not alone, and you do not need to shrink back. Your initial reaction should not be to say, well, I'm wrong. It ought to be, are they correct? And double check that. Give us a call. Let us evaluate your case, and we're happy to think through that together and make sure you have that freedom perpetuated. Because if if you give up on the case, well, a little bit of freedom has died. I don't worry about the cases that come in our front door. They present their challenge.

Jeremy Dys [00:44:37]:

I worry and lose sleep over those cases that never are risen to my attention. I can help those who come and talk to me. But if you simply give up, well, a little bit of our freedom has died in that process. So I don't worry so much about that whatsoever. But if you really want to defend religious freedom, you wanna maximize religious freedom, you don't have to be my client. You don't have to be a federal judge. You don't have to be an attorney like me. I point to my sisters.

Jeremy Dys [00:45:03]:

My sisters have between the two of them raised nine children. I'm sorry. Seven children. Nine includes our family. Seven children. Boys and girls, all of them, they have committed as a family to sit down at dinner time and other times and inculcate what they believe to them. And not just what they believe about their faith, but also what they believe about the American founding, the American experiment, our responsibilities as citizens. This has been a part of what they've done every single day of their lives.

Jeremy Dys [00:45:28]:

And frankly, they've had more effect of an effect, including my wife who does the same thing with my children and I contribute where I can. They've had more of an impact on the cause of freedom than I will ever have going to the Supreme Court once, twice, five, twenty times. Why? Yeah, we make culture shifting changes in the law, and that's good. We want to. And I acknowledge how impactful that is. But those children are gonna grow up to have spouses and children and grandchildren. Ronald Reagan taught us many years ago that freedom is always one generation away from being lost forever. It doesn't pass down through the bloodstream, he says.

Jeremy Dys [00:46:01]:

It requires a recommitment to that freedom every single generation or else we will wake up one day and tell our children about the America that used to be. That's a that's a paraphrase, of course, but you get the sense of what Reagan was after. This idea of freedom is not natural to us as humans. And look down through the the human history and you will find very rare instances of maximized freedom, where we have what we have in this country today. And so if you want to change the world, if you want to maximize religious freedom, yeah, you can become a client, you can become a judge, you can be one of us, you can work for us. We're looking for lawyers right now if you want to come and be an attorney at First Liberty. You can donate to First Liberty and make sure that we have the fuel inside the jets to go forward and do the right work we gotta do. But if you want to maximize freedom, you want to maximize religious freedom, have dinner with your kids, tell them about what the constitution means, what the first amendment means, and how they should apply it in every aspect of their life.

Jeremy Dys [00:46:56]:

That changes cultures one on one.

Jim Spiegel [00:46:59]:

Amen. You mentioned that the, the work that you do, you do for your clients pro bono. Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch, right? This demands significant resources and I was going to ask you where you get your funding. You mentioned just now, you know, the possibility of people contributing, partnering with you. Are there sources besides people just stepping up and contributing that you can take advantage of to support your work?

Jeremy Dys [00:47:25]:

Yeah. The vast amount of our resources come through private donations. You know, thousands of people that give $10 20 dollars 50 dollars more than that of course come in as well. And so we rely heavily upon those. I get a certain amount of pleasure and maybe it's a little bit of guilty pleasure though when we resolve a case at the end of litigation and submit what's called a fee bill to the government. And there's a provision in the in the laws, lawyers call it the 19 section nineteen eighty eight, that allows you to recover attorney's fees from the government when they have violated your civil rights. And the government is saying with that in, the civil rights act of 1980 1967, they're saying, it's in section nineteen eighty three, which is why I always confuse that. They're saying that if if your civil rights have been violated, you are entitled for the government to pay you for the the burden of having to hire an attorney.

Jeremy Dys [00:48:15]:

Part of the reason for that is that this is not a money making prospect. You don't get a lot of damages in these first amendment cases, but you have to outlay an expense with an attorney in order to vindicate them. So you want an injunction or whatever, you're not going to get a lot of money out of that. So there's no profit, there's no economic incentive for law firms to take these cases on other than to do the right thing. And so we're able to be free to do that as a nonprofit. And when we do sue the government and we win, which we do quite often, then we get to submit a a fee bill at the end of that. Now I'll add a little caveat to that and this is an important one. You'll never meet somebody somebody more stingy than a federal judge at the end of a conservative winning lawsuit.

Jeremy Dys [00:48:50]:

I think we, there I was just reading a fee bill the other day. We're submitting a case from some years ago that the previous, time they went up on this issue was 30¢ on the dollar that they got out of that situation. And the point we try to make to the courts is you should not be discounting. You shouldn't be getting a bargain basement price on a lawyer through this fee award at the end of a trial for vindicating what are fundamental, critical, and foundational society building laws. Right? These these opinions that come down, they're hard to navigate for one thing, so they require some specialized knowledge. But they also you shouldn't be having the guy in the back of the phone bug, no no no insult to him, running those cases. You should have people that have like real abilities in these cases, and it frankly requires people with some specialized knowledge and ability and skill to do so.

Jim Spiegel [00:49:35]:

Well, I have no idea how much you and your staff are paid, but I'll tell you this, given the not just personal, but historical impact that you guys are having, it's really incalculable. So, you know, I applaud you and just I'm sure I speak for, you know, all of our listeners. Really appreciate the work you're doing. I wanna conclude with a question that I ask each of our guests. It really is connected with their earlier questions I had about your personal faith and the sense of purpose that you have. You have a purpose driven life, as Rick Warren would put it. But I wanna ask that traditional big question, and that is, what do you take to be the meaning of life, and how does your work express that conviction?

Jeremy Dys [00:50:22]:

Well I guess I'd go back to the beginning of the catechism which is what is the chief end of man? Which is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, to use the Piperism that comes with all that, by obeying Him forever as well. So that would be my charge from a personal convictional perspective, that my job is to glorify God in all that I do. And I hope at the end of the day that I've done something that is worthy of glorifying Him and not myself. I guess you could segment that down even further into different areas of responsibility. You know, I want to be a good father. I want to be a faithful husband. I I want to be a good churchman. And I certainly would like to be known as a decent attorney.

Jeremy Dys [00:50:54]:

But I'll take just being a a a guy who, at the end of his day, did his best, failed wonderfully, but failed in the direction of David and others before him towards something that was a higher calling in his life, something that he was convicted of. And maybe that's just me being a bit more competitive than the average bear. I don't have to win everything, I just don't want to lose. At the end of the day, I want to I want to please the one who created me.

Jim Spiegel [00:51:17]:

That's great. Amen to that. And again, I commend you for what you're doing, and I appreciate this time you've you've spent with us. Thanks, Jeremy.

Jeremy Dys [00:51:25]:

Thanks so much for having me.

Jim Spiegel [00:51:27]:

Thank you for listening to the Kalos Center podcast. We gave you our thoughts. Now let us know what you think. Email us at podcast@kalos.center.